Vrbo is an online marketplace for vacation rentals owned by Expedia. We collaborated with Vrbo’s UX Team to evaluate the usability of Vrbo’s mobile web platform and discover how travelers use a smaller screen to compare and decide upon a rental stay. I led client communication and the development of the usability script and metrics.
Through surveys and in-lab usability sessions, we delivered a report to Vrbo with 9 findings and solutions that could improve usability and customer satisfaction for the mobile web portal.
Collaborators
Researchers, Designers
Role
Researcher
Skills
Script Development, Figma
Timeline
Q1 2026
The mobile web experience makes it difficult for travelers to browse and select a vacation rental.
Mobile devices provide less screen space for big money decisions that require multiple visual inputs, like selecting a vacation rental.
However, non-mobile experiences can limit communicative input from others in group travel dynamics. And the app tends to primarily be used by frequent Vrbo users.
A few features have been released in an attempt to remedy this (e.g., a property comparison tool), with seemingly little use and awareness.
The ability to have multiple tabs/windows open and the amount of space a desktop offers enables users to view multiple informational inputs that may influence their rental stay selection, compared to the mobile web experience.
How can we modify the existing mobile web experience to enable group travelers to coordinate and select a vacation rental whilst considering multiple inputs confidently?
To answer this question, we hosted six usability testing sessions with Vrbo users who were in at the beginning stages of looking for a place to stay with a group during an upcoming trip.
Let’s use today to try and find identify a potential rental you’d considering booking for your upcoming trip. How would you go about doing that?
I created the script used for testing. The test was semi-structured, as to let participants browse through various rental property options through their typical various workflows with the occasional interjection for questions. This included pre-scripted preparation for edge case scenarios participants could encounter. After testing, we would demonstrate specific features that participants did not encounter to facilitate further feedback.
The observation room set up with: audio, TV for screen recording, TV for room and participant behavior, and a table for notetaking.
The double-sided mirror from the observer room to the testing room, along with audio and camera recording footage.
Very Difficult
1
Difficult
2
Somewhat difficult
3
Neither Easy nor Difficult
4
Somewhat easy
5
Easy
6
Very Easy
7
To evaluate perceived usability, after every participant completed a task we anticipated they would, we would ask them to rate how difficult they felt it was to complete. We accompanied this perceived difficulty with an error rate we calculated to evaluate behavioral usability.
P1
Friend Trip · Vrbo User
P2
Family Trip · Not Vrbo User
P3
Family Trip · Vrbo User
P4
Family Trip · Not Vrbo User
P5
Family Trip · Not Vrbo User
P6
Solo Trip · Vrbo User
Our criteria for screening were people planning a family or friend trip who have used Vrbo in the past. However, we found that some participants deviated from our expectations. More on this will be explored in Reflection.
Jump to Reflection
For our report, the audience were various different product teams at Vrbo, as our user flow touched on multiple different teams’ features. Therefore, we had to ensure that when we presented our work, it was valuable to the PMs, developers, and UXers that would be attending, but also very clear on what portions of the journey participants had the most difficulty with.
To do this, we created three deliverables: A presentation, a master report.
The presentation deck contained an hour’s worth of prioritized insights that would be the most actionable for the product teams and the most rewarding for customers. The master report, was a 40 page document that listed every actionable insight Vrbo, with each insight tagged with a respective product owner. This way, product teams at Vrbo could find exactly which insights pertained to them.
Looking back at this project, there were two areas where I felt as a researcher, I would do differently if we reapproached to take on something similar to this project.
For recruitment, Vrbo works with User Research International. And though working with them made recruitment quick, which was necessary for the timeline we were working with, we would have appreciated the opportunity to work with them more directly as opposed to through Vrbo, for some of our screening criteria didn’t make it into the final screener as intended, resulting in most of our participants deviating away from our target sample.
Very Difficult
1
Difficult
2
Somewhat difficult
3
Neither Easy nor Difficult
4
Somewhat easy
5
Easy
6
Very Easy
7
Our study was primarily qualitative, where participants were leading themselves through the browsing process of finding a rental for their trip. This is meant to be a very natural conversation. As a result of that, us as researchers found it difficult to find natural spots where we could interject to ask participants to rate the experience they had mid-flow. Rather than interjecting, in the future, I think it’d be more natural to have participants receive a follow-up survey asking them to rank the various aspects of the experience.
